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Recent News & Accomplishments

Join the department on November 4th-5th to celebrate women in computing at Technica, UMD’s all-women's hackathon . Hackathons bring computer programmers and other interested people together to immerse themselves in tech culture. Technica will take place from November 4th-5th at the Reckord Armory and the event is free. Technica’s main goal is to introduce people who identify as women or non-binary from diverse backgrounds to tech. Anyone (including males) can mentor or volunteer. No computer science experience or coding/tech skills are necessary to participate - It’s a great way to learn...

Matias Duarte '96 has been featured in Surface Magazine in a long-form article entitled " Duarte's Material World ." It addresses his design aesthetic and his role as Google's Vice President of Design. From the article: "Duarte’s latest project exemplifies how his bold ambitions, combined with a humble profile, enable him to push boundaries. Since shaping the experience of Google’s entire range of products, he has now set out to redesign the design process itself. 'We’re treating the process of design as a design problem,' he says. 'I want the design process to be really transparent. I want...

Mohit Iyyer and Srijan Kumar have been named the 2017 recipients of the Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award. This dissertation award recognizes the two most outstanding dissertations completed over the past year in the department. Iyyer’s dissertation is entitled Beyond Sentential Language Understanding with Deep Learning ; he was advised by Jordan Boyd-Graber and Hal Daumé III. Kumar’s dissertation is entitled Characterization and Detection of Malicious Behavior on the Web , and he was advised by V.S. Subrahmanian. A committee of professorial faculty solicit nominations for this award...

Ph.D. students Greg Davis and Matthew Evanusa have been accepted into the 2017 class of the University of Maryland’s COMBINE (Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks) fellows program. This National Science Foundation-funded Research Traineeship (NRT) program, gives graduate students the opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary research and training in quantitative modeling methods from physics and mathematics with data processing, analysis, and visualization tools from computer science to investigate structural and dynamical principles governing living systems. The program...

Assistant Professor Michelle Mazurek and PhD student Doowon Kim have recently been awarded the 5th annual NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper . Their paper called "You Get Where You're Looking For: The Impact of Information Sources on Code Security," was presented at at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Mazurek and Kim worked with fellow researchers from CISPA, Saarland University. Their paper explores why software developers write programs that have security vulnerabilities and present scientific evidence confirming anecdotal stories in the programming community. The...

Assistant Professor Dave Levin received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2017 USENIX Security Symposium for his paper entitled "A Longitudinal, End-to-End View of the DNSSEC Ecosystem." Written with colleagues from Northeastern University, TU Berlin, University of Twente, and Duke University, the paper addresses Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and how well it is deployed on the internet today. All users of the internet depend on DNS (Domain Name Service)--it is the system which maps easily recognizable names including www.umd.edu to internet-routable addresss like 1.2.3.4...

Assistant Professor Marine Carpuat and PhD Student Yogarshi Vyas were awarded the Adam Kilgarriff Best Paper Award at the SEM conference (Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics) in August. Their paper is entitled "Detecting Asymmetric Semantic Relations in Context : A Case Study on Hypernymy Detection." Vyas explained that the paper address a key challenge in natural language understanding, which is the building of models that can understand the meaning of words and the relations that exist between them. One such relation is hypernymy, which can be defined as an “is-a”...

The Department of Computer Science is pleased to announced that Associate Professor Hal Daumé III has been named to The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study Group. This appointment term is from summer 2017-2020 The group welcomes thirty of the brightest scientists and engineers who work together and determine new areas of development in computer and communication technologies and to recommend future research directions. T he ISAT Study Group was established by DARPA in 1987 to support its technology offices and provide continuing...

Since 2013, the Computer Science Department has hosted students from around the country to participate in a Research Experience for Undergraduate/Combinatorics and Algorithms for Real Problems / (REU-CAAR) program each summer. This year, twenty students from around the country have come to do research with professors in the D epartments of Computer Science and the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor William Gasarch and Professor Samir Khuller lead the program, which offers very diverse periences for student researchers. The REU program pairs a professor with two or more...

In his first email to the department since being named interim chair of Computer Science on July 3rd, 2017, Professor Larry Davis sent the following email celebrating Emeritus Professor Jack Minker: "Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Jack Minker on celebrating his 90th birthday tomorrow, July 4. Jack joined the University of Maryland in 1971 and was the founding chair (1974) of our department. Through his hard work both as chair, and as a pioneer in the logical foundations of artificial intelligence, he set the high standards that we have all strived to maintain for nearly 50 years. Jack...